if the heavens ever did speak
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
It is a relief, in a way, that she didn’t know the clown. It suggests that there was something else – timelines stretched out like tentacles, universes laid parallel but never touching. It is a relief that wasn’t there with him, that she didn’t see the clown and his Glasgow smile, or the tiger with no face.
The names are the same but the circumstances were not, and while the implications of this are heavy and strange, overwhelming to think about (though, all of this is too overwhelming to think about). They started the same but grew somewhere else.
The giant impossibility of the world – the worlds – loom large, and he wonders if there is a universe where none of this happened, to either of them, and if there is a universe where they met unburdened by these memories, and what that would be like.
“Not really,” he says quietly, for though the clown had lurked and purred quiet threats, there had not been much – the teeth sunk into his flesh, leaving a scar with a strange and impossible story, but in the long run, it had not been much.
No, who the clown had hurt was her - was the girl, sleeping fitfully as the clown murmured things into her ears, worked its strange magic to command her.
She loves us, he had thought, and with the thought had come the desire to protect the girl who would end up burning him.
If you died, then how do you live. How are you here.
How is he anything – how is he flesh, how does he know the brilliant intricacies of their minds. How, how is he here, when by all rights he should be ash, should be gone.
“It was real,” he says, nonsensical, then, “but it also wasn’t.”
“We weren’t flesh, for her.”
He recalls the slickness of his plastic skin, the tangle of mane like a waterfall, black and violet-streaked.
“I died,” he says, and in the words are memories of smoke, of ash. He can taste it on his tongue.
“I died, and I woke up like this.”
Like this: purple, strange, impossible.
sleaze
cancer x garbage
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